A shortage of skilled engineers could slow the growth of India's
technology companies, despite the high number engineering graduates.
Although India graduates 400,000 engineers annually, a new National
Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) study that found
only one out of four engineering graduates to be employable, and predicted
a shortage of 500,00 workers in the technology sector by 2010. Nasscom
found that many graduates lacked the necessary technical skills, were not
fluent in English, or are unable to work in a team. Those students who are
qualified benefit from the skyrocketing demand: they have a choice between
several jobs that are guaranteed before graduation and salaries beyond any
experienced in past generations. India does not allow private investment
in higher education, despite the technology industry lobbying in favor of
it. The combination of a low availability of quality education and a
service sector growing faster than that of China, expected to double to 1.7
million jobs in the next four years, has forced many companies to institute
in-house training that can last up to six months. Institutions known as
finishing schools have also emerged to help graduates become more
employable. The best schools produce too few graduates, while the rest of
the schools severely lack in quality. Brand new colleges, most of which
are private, have sprouted up in an attempt to meet the growing demand,
tripling the number of engineering colleges in the past 10 years. Higher
education is still only available to 10 percent of Indians ages 18 to 25,
while half of the population is under 25. Nandan M. Nilenkania, chief
executive of Infosys, calls this situation "a golden opportunity...which
can be frittered away if we don't do the right thing."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Wired News consulted UC Berkeley's David Wagner and Princeton's Ed Felton
in order to come up with a wish list for the ideal voting machine. The two
computer scientists agreed that regarding the hardware used, a ballot
marking machine is the best option. This device uses a touch screen
interface that is universally useable, but instead of recording the votes
onto a memory card, it prints votes onto a full-size paper ballot one at a
time, rather than off a ream of paper. The ballots are then scanned by an
optical reader, which digitally records each vote. The current removable
memory cards must be done away with. Security measures are insufficient to
assure no tampering occurs. Wagner is researching possible ways to store
votes on a memory card so they cannot be changed once entered. As for the
software, most voting machines were built for other purposes and converted.
The result is code that is excessive and provides camouflage for malicious
code. Wagner says the goal is to reduce the code to a minimum. Another
problem with the code is that it is kept secret; judges have defended this
right of the manufacturers. In order to ensure the integrity of an
election, the code must be disclosed. Also needed are machines that can
display the programs running on them and recognize if one does not match
the approved program. Diebold itself was found to have installed a
non-certified version of voting software onto machines in California.
Mandatory audits are suggested as well: random spot checks of machines on
election day, followed by post-election hand audits to ensure recording and
counting is done correctly. The problem of post-election voter
verification, however, is not easily solved. Cryptographer David Chaum is
devising a system whereby voters would receive encrypted receipts that
could be compared to results posted online after the election. While
voting security can never quite be perfected, Felten says all we can do is
take steps to "reduce the window of vulnerability." For information about
ACM's e-voting activities, visit
http://www.acm.org/usacmClick Here to View Full Articleto the top

Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology President Telle Whitney, a
key speaker at this week's Markham's Cascon 2006 Conference, one of the
largest computer conferences in Canada, discusses why young women are
tentative about the prospect of joining the male-dominated field. Whitney
points out that at one point in the past, women received 40 percent of U.S.
bachelor's degrees in computer science, a number that has recently fallen
to 27 percent. Research institutes are made up of less than 20 percent
female computer science students and 11 percent engineering students.
Whitney says the data shows that "women and men are equally capable of
creating and designing technology." While she acknowledges that
"technology is less appealing to some young women," she thinks "that
message just isn't getting out, that technology can be cool." There is
currently a shortage of technology employees around the globe, and Whitney
thinks that "one of the great untapped resources [to combat the shortage]
are women." She points out that puberty is the time when girls become more
concerned with role models and what others think of them, and consequently
lose interest in math and science, so showing them women who are succeeding
in technology could help reverse this trend. The purpose of the Anita Borg
Institute for Women and Technology is to "demonstrate that there are some
really cool things that women are doing in technology right now," says
Whitney. As far as marketing technology to women, the Star cites the pink
Motorola Razr cell phone, but Whitney says products such as The Sims are a
better example, because they get past the surface level of gender, and have
a better understanding of what appeals to women.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Confesor Santiago, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student
at Rowan University, and Dr. Adrian Rusu, a computer science assistant
professor, have developed Real-Time Area-Efficient Synchronized Tree-Based
Web Visualization & Data (RAST Web V&D), software that helps users browse
the Web without getting lost or confused as to where they are, where they
have been, or where they can go from a certain point. Users are provided
with a view of where their browser began, and where it has taken them,
using circles within circles, which represent "parent" (current site) and
"children" (links in current site) sites. Inside each circle are all the
sites that can be accessed from that particular location. This interactive
graphic appears alongside the page currently displayed. "This is a
proposed solution to the 'lost in cyberspace' problem as well as a method
to find something easier...Looking back, you can see clearly where you've
already been and looking ahead you can see if a page is worth visiting even
before you go there," says Santiago. The depth of the program is only
limited by a computer's memory; infinite "generations" are theoretically
possible. While similar technology has been devised before, Santiago and
Rusu's has "transitional animation," which morphs parent into child when a
link is activated and changes back when the browser returns to the root
site. The name and URL of a link can be read simply by moving the cursor
over a link. Although anyone can use the "point and click" program,
Santiago sees Web developers making use of the program to get a visual idea
of the design of their creation. Future steps in the process will be to
"import [the] technology to devices with small screens, such as cell phones
and PDAs," as well as expanding into 3D to provide greater flexibility as
to how the information can be presented.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

An IST-funded initiative known as the TEAHA project is working to make the
"smart home" an everyday reality. "Until now the business model has not
been clear, there have been too many different standards, and too many
technologies that are not interoperable," says project coordinator Enrique
Menduina of Telefonica I+D in Spain. TEAHA has been able to bring
companies together from all sectors. The system in the works will be
compatible with any device, regardless of brand. "Having your TV tell you
when your laundry is done, or the dishwasher has finished, is just one
application, " explains Menduina. The concept is based on having several
appliances and devices running innumerable services. To allow such
interoperability, TEAHA is developing a middleware platform that mediates
between different appliances and communications systems. Its foundation is
a software gateway through which information from all devices passes, no
matter what network they use. The system has zero-configuration
capability, meaning appliances would be discovered by the middleware.
Different communications systems fit different devices better; for example,
the TV would work best with Wi-Fi, but a smoke alarm would require lesser
bandwidth. Two methods of interconnectivity are being developed: an
advanced radio frequency (RF) system for transmitting information
wirelessly, and a system to send packets of information between devices
using power lines, requiring no additional wiring. Extensive testing is
scheduled for December 2006, and the results will be incorporated in
commercial systems in Europe that will improve home networking.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Brown University researchers have developed an AJAX-based programming
language dubbed Flapjax for building Web applications. The researchers say
Flapjax makes AJAX development easier to execute by hiding its complexity.
"Its syntax is precisely that of JavaScript," says project leader Shriram
Krishnamurthi, a computer science professor at Brown. "Flapjax is built
entirely atop JavaScript, it runs on traditional Web browsers without the
need for plug-ins or other downloads." The system is based on six
principles: it is event driven and responsive; its template system does
away with unnecessary code; all clients sharing a set of data are
constantly updated by a persistent store; data can be shared; the data
sharing is channeled by an access control feature; and it libraries to
connect with external Web sites, making client-side mashups possible.
"Instead of worrying about building low-level packets, etc., we give you a
simple way of saying, 'This datum resides on a remote server--send all of
my updates to it, and get all the updates from it to me.' That's what AJAX
is typically used for, but never to that high level of abstraction,"
explains Krishnamurthi. Programmers can either adopt the technology as a
novel language sharing the syntax of JavaScript but making the task of
writing interactive programs more natural, or they can use it as a
JavaScript library that helps in creating interactive programs. Flapjax is
"interesting...it could help if teamed up with a framework like...[Ruby on]
Rails," says Ajaxian.com founder Dion Almaer. However, others say Flapjax
makes development more complex. Krishnamurthi maintains it is widely
usable and has an "unobtrusive" mode that separates the application's
presentation layer from its markup, functioning like aspect-oriented
programming.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Sun Microsystems has created Project Blackbox, a shippable data center
intended for companies who need to expand computing capacity but do not
have the time or resources to create such a system in-house. The "data
center in a box" consists of seven racks of 35 server computers based on
either Sun's Niagara Sparc processor or an Opteron chip from Advanced Micro
Devices, and lies within a 20-foot shipping container that is equipped with
a water-cooling system. Sun claims that after delivery, the data center
can be operational in five minutes. Sun CEO Jonathan I. Schwarz says
Operation Blackbox, which is five times as space-efficient as traditional
data centers and 10 to 15 percent more power-efficient, is intended for
projects that must come to market or scale up quickly, rather than all
types of large-scale computing projects. Applied Minds co-Chairman W.
Daniel Hillis, an independent computer designer who has done pioneering
work in supercomputing and artificial intelligence, was selected for the
project by Sun. Hillis realized that companies were wasting their time
developing their own systems from smaller components. "It struck me that
everyone was rolling their own in-house and doing manufacturing in-house.
We realized that this is obviously something that is shippable," says
Hillis. The box can be used anywhere there is electricity, chilled water,
and an internet connection. University of California, Berkeley computer
scientist and former ACM president Daniel A. Patterson says, "What an
out-there idea...You could convert your warehouse into a modern data
center." Five patents have been applied for by Sun, including one for the
water-cooling technique, known as "cyclonic cooling."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Rice University computer science professor and voting machine expert Dan
Wallach discusses the security of voting systems, and concludes that voting
machine vendors for the most part gloss over the issue, while certification
and testing procedures are insufficient. He cites a Princeton study into
the vulnerability of Diebold voting systems, noting that poll workers use
memory cards to collect the results at the end of the day, and these cards
could be used to infect the machines with a virus. In discussing
mitigation of this problem, Wallach says there should be short-term and
long-term solutions, with the former including not putting memory cards or
voting machines in sole custody of one person. Including paper ballots is
a long-term mitigation Wallach recommends, as such ballots can be used for
recounts and other instances where the outcome is in doubt. The professor
notes that some states have done a better job of analyzing electronic
voting systems and requiring vendors to fix security flaws than others.
Wallach's students test voting machine security by role-playing company
employees trying to fix an election by subtly altering the system's
software, and certification authorities trying to spot such modifications;
this exercise has demonstrated the feasibility of a scenario in which
actual voting systems' source code could be tampered with and released as
legitimate software without being detected by the certification process.
Wallach attributes the inadequacy of voting system certification and
testing procedures to vaguely defined standards. Remedial action he
suggests is to write standards for the threats the machines face rather
than for how the machines are built, and for certification staff to be
knowledgeable on implementing such threats. For information about ACM's
e-voting activities,
including the recent report on voter registration databases, visit
http://www.acm.org/usacmClick Here to View Full Articleto the top

Rather than using simply electrical current, researchers are looking into
using the spin of an electron, allowing for higher efficiency and greater
computational ability. Arthur Smith, physics professor at Ohio University,
and his colleagues have made the first step toward this goal by growing
magnesium gallium, a magnetic metal, on gallium nitride, a semiconductor.
Smith's team claims that the two materials are joined by a nearly seamless
interface, which is necessary for electrons to retain their spin as they
move from one material to the other. The system is also said to retains
its magnetic properties at room temperature, whereas most require extremely
low temperatures. There is no conclusive evidence that electrons will be
able to travel between the materials as needed, but Smith says "we think
there's a good chance that it'll work pretty well." Although today's
electronics need current to operate, spintronic devices can be maintained
even when a device's power is turned off, meaning less total power would be
needed. Spin also allows for a greater amount of information to be stored
and transmitted by electrons, creating faster microprocessors. While
spintronics may not be in our near future, Smith thinks it could first be
applied to opto-electronics, such as lasers and LEDs. Kannan Krishnan,
professor of material science at the University of Washington in Seattle
calls Smith's work "very promising," because the materials developed have
"good properties." The next step is to test the functionality of this
technology in actual systems, specifically, to study how effectively the
spin of electrons in the magnetized material translates into polarized
light.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

A new study from researchers at the University of Indiana indicates that
as much as 14 percent of Americans may be getting duped into giving up
private information in "phishing" scams. The figure is much higher than
the 3 percent of adults a year cited in several surveys by Gartner Group.
Researchers from IU's School of Informatics settled on 14 percent after
simulating phishing attacks, in which they sent emails with a link to eBay
customers that appeared to be legitimate. When recipients clicked on the
link, they were sent to the eBay site, and the researchers were notified of
the log-in. The researchers also launched a simulated spear phishing
attack, in which personal information available online is used to create a
more personal message for targets. "We think spear phishing attacks will
become more prevalent as phishers are more able to harvest publicly
available information to personalize each attack," says Jacob Ratkiewicz, a
computer science doctoral student. Markus Jakobsson, associate director of
the IU Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, says, "Our goal was to
determine the success rates of different types of phishing attacks, not
only the types used today, but those that don't yet occur in the wild,
too." "Designing Ethical Phishing Experiments: A Study of eBay Query
Features" is the title of the study.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Worldwide IBM camps are giving girls the opportunity to explore IT career
options. Exploring Interests in IT and Engineering (EXITE) camps were held
in 50 locations this year. Activities included robot programming, digital
music-making, and hands-on mechanical engineering. A mentoring program
that will last the rest of the year has also been established. "A lot of
these girls are from schools with career counselors who are from an older
generation to us, and most often have got stereotypes that women should go
into careers like teaching and nursing," says Saloni Jirathaneswongse, an
IBM consultant who worked at the camp in Sydney, Australia. "It's really
important that this mentoring program opens their eyes to other careers and
opportunities, because they don't get that awareness from their
backgrounds." The program experienced great success, inspiring many girls,
according to Alison de Kleuver, who manages IBM's Australia and New Zealand
Sales operations. "Girls at this age are quite idealistic," adds de
Kleuver. "They come out of this [mechanical engineering activity] saying,
'Wow, if I'm an engineer I could change the world!'" EXITE's goal is to
get rid of outdated stereotypes that can be harmful to generations of
talented young women, as well as the IT industry. "There is no in-a-box
description of a woman in IT," says de Kleuver. "We all feel that we're in
an industry that's treated us very well, and we don't want girls to be
making uninformed decisions."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The latest developments in vehicle intelligence were on display at this
week's Transport Systems World Congress in London. German company Ibeo
showed a prototype system that would enable a car to automatically follow
the flow of traffic. The smart car has an infrared laser scanner in its
bumper to track objects up to 200 meters away that are stationary or moving
at speeds of up to 112 miles per hour, and makes use of a computer to keep
it at a safe distance, stop, or start if it gets stuck in traffic. Other
companies are focusing on alerting distracted drivers. Japanese automotive
company Aisin has placed an infrared camera behind the steering wheel to
detect when a driver has turned away from the road, as part of a system
that delivers an audible alarm and vibrates the driver's seat, and a
similar infrared camera developed by DENSO of Japan is designed to closely
analyze eye movement. Meanwhile, Toyota showed off an intelligent parking
system that uses ultrasonic sensors to guide cars into parking spaces, and
requires drivers to only use their breaks to control the speed of the
vehicle. "Future developments will probably see a system that lets you get
out and leave the car to park itself," says a spokesman for Toyota, which
expects some U.S. models to have the system by 2007.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The Generic Graphical Library (GEGL), long slated to replace GIMP, was
demonstrated publicly by GIMP developer Oyvind Kolas on Friday at the
Piksel 06 festival in Bergen, Norway. GEGL, which had been first proposed
in 1999, had been all but written off by critics, as GIMP had remained in
place through several rounds of tweaking. After the summer of 2005, when
it looked as if GEGL would never be introduced, Kolas, Sven Neumann, and
Michael Natterer studied the code base and got it into functional shape
again. This most recent demonstration displayed a new graphical interface
from that shown in March 2006 at the Libre Graphics Meeting. Rather than
implementing editing functions, the GUI allows the user to test out all of
the core operations of GEGL on a live image. This version of the GUI tool
has 87 total operations. Active operations are shown as a tree, and
operations can be added as a "sibling" at the current level of the tree, or
as a "child" of another operation. Such use of live compositing reveals
one of GEGL's unusual design parameters: every image is a directed acyclic
graph, an ordered, connected set of nodes, where each node consists of an
input, operation, and output, rather than being simple pixel arrays. What
this means is that all operations are equal, can be applied to any graph,
and can be rearranged arbitrarily. Currently, the GUI tool is only
experimental, as it cannot be used for editing, is prone to crashes, and is
undocumented. Kolas hopes his progress on GEGL will attract the attention
of other programmers, who can now search its architecture and
capabilities.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

For the past five years, Microsoft computer engineer Gordon Bell has
headed a project to create a new digital device that would enable users to
record every moment of their life, and then search its database whenever
they want to review a paper, fax, phone call, photograph, movie, Web site,
IM conversation, or television or radio transcript. "The interim objective
is to make this kind of system available, to gradually put these kinds of
capabilities in all of our PCs," says Bell. He believes people would be
interested in having such a surrogate memory because it would allow them to
preserve analog and digital information forever. Q-Tech co-founder Sunil
Vemuri is also focusing on a memory solution, but he is developing
technology that would allow existing cell phones, computers, and other
communications devices to serve as the memory aid. "Because you know,
people carry mobile phones all the time, and I haven't heard of anyone
lately calling it intrusive," says Vemuri. People would not be able to use
his technology to find missing keys, a remote control, or other physical
objects. Though Vemuri attempts to address concerns about privacy,
security is as much a pressing issue for such recording devices.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

For researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
next-generation radio frequency identification means encoding RFID
microchips with sensors, which would allow the chips to hold more data.
"We're trying to develop chips that consume very low power, can read at
longer distances, and are smarter," says Magdy Bayoumi, director of UL's
Center for Advanced Computer Studies. UL is also focusing on making the
chips more affordable, and Bayoumi adds that they would need to cost no
more than 5 cents to be economical. Researchers are working to improve
software for RFID so that the technology can be used in new ways, such as
for tracking purchases of certain medications associated with an illness,
which would be helpful for detecting potential health outbreaks. With
RFID, which is expected to replace traditional bar codes in a few years,
tags can be placed in commercial products or even humans, and data such as
location or temperature can be transmitted via a radio signal to devices
that can download the information. "The next level is to not only make
more applications, but make it more secure," adds Soumik Ghosh, a doctoral
student studying computer engineering from New Delhi, India.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Michael A Johnson has been assigned the task of choosing the
microprocessor that will accompany astronauts back to the moon. Targeted
so far have been CPUs with as much as 3,000 Mips of performance and 2,000
Mips/watt in energy efficiency. The CPU must handle a total-life-cycle
radiation dose of 100 kilorads, and be virtually immune to any "latchups,"
or hard errors caused when a high-energy particle fires a chip with
junction back-bias and excessive current draw. Construction of the manned
lunar-exploration mission will begin in 2011, with the manned-mission
occurring before 2020. Johnson says the excitement of going back to the
moon should reinvigorate engineers, despite the recent cuts in the R&D
budget and cancellations of entire projects. One hope of Johnson's is to
collaborate on a chip with the military space program. Five years ago, a
radiation hardened PowerPC 750 was developed for just this purpose.
Constrained as he is, Johnson may have to choose a single chip, which
presents problems. A general-purpose processor would benefit some
applications, while others (a robotic vehicle) would be a better fit for a
single- or multiple-instruction, multiple-data architecture. There is no
telling whether the government will decide on a standalone processor or a
system-on-chip (SoC) to serve a wide range of platforms. Various other
solutions are being looked into by NASA, including three partially hardened
CPUs in a system in which the chips "vote" on results, but in the past this
type of system has shown to require too much power. Besides Johnson, other
project managers at NASA are looking into low-temperature devices able to
operate at -180 degrees Celsius, for environments such as the dark side of
the moon, and reconfigurable systems that can be programmed as mission
changes occur, or to manage faults during a long mission.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The number of U.K. graduate students enrolling in computer science has
fallen precipitously; not only are fewer graduates with IT skills entering
the job market, but employers complain that the quality of graduates is
declining. According to the Confederation of British Industry, over
one-third of adults in the United Kingdom lack a basic school-leaving
qualification, while one-third of employers are having to send staff for
remedial training in English and mathematics. Practical hands-on
experience and grammar are deficit areas that employers often cite. "The
real problem is that it is getting harder and harder for IT managers to
take on entry-level people and investing the two to three years needed to
get them productive," says Toshiba U.K.'s Sandra Smith. She adds that this
reinforces the appeal of outsourcing IT jobs to workers outside of Britain.
"We need to see more U.K. employers taking in entry-level people here, and
giving them time to gain the commercial skills they need, because surely we
can't let it all go offshore?" Smith argues. More young people may be
encouraged to study computing and other sciences if the cost of a U.K.
science degree is slashed, according to LogicaCMG CEO Martin Read.Click Here to View Full Article
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Next-generation semiconductor technologies will have to overcome issues of
scalability and cost, and manufacturers are investigating natural
structures for solutions. Scaling to 32 nm and below will require high
channel doping, giving designers the challenge of lowering gate-induced
drain-leakage current and threshold voltage variations while scaling the
supply voltage; lithography processes will also need to be overhauled,
while signal isolation in RF, analog, and mixed-signal design for wireless
will present challenges. Other issues of concern to manufacturers include
the expected move to 450-mm wafers by 2012, which will require the adoption
of wafer, metrology, and processing equipment standards, and the need to
minimize signal propagation delay and power consumption through the use of
a low dielectric constant material of about 2.0. Among the areas of
technology research that focus on solving such problems are carbon
nanotubes, which have very high current densities, and their use in
electric circuits requires a reliable method for controlling the type of
nanotube generated. Superconducting circuits are another area under
investigation, since their advantages include perfect conduction, no
interior magnetic field, frequency-independent magnetic penetration depth,
extremely low operating power, zero dc electrical resistance, and super-low
power dissipation. Three-dimensional trigate transistors are also a
possibility with their promise of better standby current, less leakage
current, and potential scaling to the 15-nm range. Semiconductor packaging
companies have challenges of their own when switching to greener materials
and new standards, and redistributive chip packaging (RCP) and quad flat
no-lead (QFN) technologies are being considered. RCP reduces packaging
costs and shrinks the size of high-pitch packages by half, while QFNs offer
compact size, reduced weight, and outstanding electrical and thermal
properties.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The long, laborious transition from 32-bit microprocessors to 64-bit
microprocessors contains key lessons illustrating the axiom that design
decisions made decades ago will shape future software. Insights derived
from such lessons include the fact that real restraints may drive bad
decisions; decisions that were reasonable 20 years ago turn out to have
been less than optimal; certain decisions may have short-term advantages
but long-term shortcomings; and predictable trends are disregarded, or
transition initiatives poorly estimated. It was established that address
bits are in short supply and are eventually used up, even in successful
computer families, while thinking ahead can help deal with the constraint
of upward compatibility. Also demonstrated as the transition continued was
the lesson that it takes a prolonged period of time to convert an installed
base of hardware in a successful computer family, while software has an
even longer cycle; furthermore, switching from 32 bits to 64/32 bits
constitutes a long-term coexistence prospect. The heating up of 64-bit in
the early 1990s brought attention to the fact that standards are frequently
generated in nonstandard ways, and de facto standards long precede official
standards in many cases. In addition, disagreement between reasonable
people can happen, particularly when different sets of data are studied,
while sometimes taking a reasonable step involves collaboration with
rivals. Also, programmers exploit extra bits or specification ambiguity,
and most arguments occur because of differing implicit assumptions made by
application programmers. Another lesson is that although code can be
recompiled, once data gets written somewhere, any new code must still be
capable of describing it cleanly. It is probably a wise course of action
to devise a notation for 128-bit integers, since the integers' generated
code on 64-bit CPUs is close to identical to 64-bit code on 32-bit CPUs.
Finally, it pays to think ahead about software decisions, as the
ramifications of those decisions are longer-lasting than hardware
decisions.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top